Landscape Shoes

Jared Steffensen

Salt Lake City, Utah

Landscape Shoes are meant to be an unexpected experience within the shoe store. Erik and Jodi Milton, who are artists themselves, have welcomed Jared Steffenson’s installation into Willymoc’s, their Main Street shoe store in Rushville. Here, Jared’s shoes appear alongside new shoes for sale. Each pair of altered shoes depicts an imagined landscape.  The landscapes are a nod toward where the wearer may have worn them. They range from rocky mountain tops, tree lined fields, and rolling hills.  Some of the shoes represent personal landscapes, tapping into the places their owners think of as “home.” These shoes become reference points and a way to speak about place, homesickness, and the desire to bring “home” with you wherever you go.

Eventually, the project evolved into creating shoes for specific people using the landscapes of where they considered “home” as a reference point for the constructed landscapes. They became a way to speak about place, home sickness, and the desire to bring “home” with you wherever you go. 

Sanhills Institute invited Jared Stephensen to place these shoes at Walleymocs shoe store on Main St. in Rushville during the Main Street exhibition.

Jared Steffenssen is an artist and Curator of Exhibitions at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art in Salt Lake City, Utah. He eared a BFA in Indermedia Sculpture from the University of Utah in 2002 and an  MFA in Studio Art from the University off Texas at Austin in 2006. His artwork has been exhibited throughout the United States and in Mexico, Germany, and The Netherlands.

This project is sponsored by the Sandhills Institute and is part of a larger exhibition called Art aRound Town (Aug-Sep 2024).